8/25-26 Ride to Whale Watching

Mark your calendars for a great 6hr/170 mile back roads ride from Redmond/Woodinville to Bellingham to go whale watching. The link for the route is a little long to post, but it includes some local favorites like High Bridge, Marine Drive, the nice and twisty part of Hwy 9 north of Hwy 20, Lake Whatcom and the Chuckanut Loop/Lake Samish.

The plan is to head out Saturday around 11am and get to the hotel around 4pm (hotel details to be posted later, but bring swimwear since it'll probably have a hot tub). Then Sunday we take the 10am whale watching cruise which returns back around 4:30. You can just do the ride, whale watching or both - your choice. If you want to join us for the whale watching, you can get tickets half off until end of Friday (6/15) at http://bit.ly/WhaleWatchingDeal2. Getting the deal is completely optional, but half off is real nice.

Working with my friend/sweep on the starting location, but will post when we decide. Again it'll probably be in Redmond O'Reilly's on Redmond Way or in Woodinville off Hwy 522. Let us know if you plan to ride with us.

Working with my friend/sweep on the starting location, but will post when we decide. Again it'll probably be in Redmond O'Reilly's on Redmond Way or in Woodinville off Hwy 522. Let us know if you plan to ride with us.

If only she'd posted two tentative starting locations in her OP with a promise to update once it was final.

Click to expand...

Hey thanks, I completely missed that. Trying to bury the hatchet with Diva, as it were. Maybe we'll find out that we have a lot in common if we just get a chance to speak to each other, face to face. You know?

Levels of certain stress hormones decreased in samples of orca scat gathered during the time of highest vessel traffic, instead of increasing, researchers found. They surmise this is because at the same time, the whales' favorite food, chinook salmon, was most abundant.

Interestingly, the orcas' stress-hormone levels only increased when vessel noise was higher if there also were lower levels of food available at that time.

"I like to call it my buffet-in-a-bar example," said Katherine Ayres, lead author of a paper on the study published in PLoS ONE, released Wednesday. Patrons in a noisy bar won't mind the racket if all their favorite foods are piled high on the buffet. "But you go there and they are only serving rice and potatoes, and it's super noisy and crowded, then it's, 'I am not getting a good meal and these boats are driving me crazy.'"

Sam Wasser, director of University of Washington's Department of Biology Center for Conservation Biology, said the study points to the importance of putting fish first as managers look for the priority management steps, amid reducing toxins and pollution, vessel noise and improving food supply, for orca recovery.

"If you are a manager, you really want to know what are the relative importance of those, and how do they interact, and our study did that; it found that fish are the most important," Wasser said.

Efforts to build up Puget Sound chinook have been under way since before they were listed as threatened more than 10 years ago.

Yet despite the knowledge that habitat is key to chinook survival, a review of the implementation of the recovery plan for chinook for NOAA Fisheries last year showed the region has continued to lose habitat since the listing.

From 2001 to 2006, the amount of developed land in Puget Sound increased about 3 percent, with nearly two-thirds of that converted from forests or agricultural land to pavement. That translates to a loss of about 10,700 more acres of forest cover and 4,300 acres of agricultural land over that period.

Western Washington Treaty Tribes reported in a 2011 White Paper that salmon returns have continued to dwindle to the point that tribes are catching fewer salmon today than before the 1974 Boldt decision, which secured their right to half the salmon catch.

To some it's no surprise that food supply and habitat that will support healthy salmon runs would be seen as key to orca recovery. Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research said he remembered seeing far more orcas back when he also used to see far more fishing boats off the west coast of the San Juan Islands. The whales never seemed to mind the boats - back when there were lots of fish.

Devil-Doc: I don't see your comments along with a few others. Try sending me a PM, if you can, to see about burying that hatchet. I'm not here looking for "drama", I'll get enough of that in the opera this summer, I just want to ride and meet other cool people to ride with.

Devil-Doc: I don't see your comments along with a few others. Try sending me a PM, if you can, to see about burying that hatchet. I'm not here looking for "drama", I'll get enough of that in the opera this summer, I just want to ride and meet other cool people to ride with.

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PNW Riders is a motorcycle rider enthusiast community for all types of riders in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and the surrounding areas. Although we focus on regional Pacific Northwest riders, we often have members from the Midwest, East Coast and overseas enjoying the site. It doesn’t matter if you ride the street or the dirt, a sportbike or a cruiser, a super-motard or strictly race on the track - all motorcycle riders are welcome!